


You Get the Big Guy

by 94BottlesOfSnapple



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Genre: BAMF Bruce Banner, BAMF Natasha Romanov, Gen, Internal Monologue, Minor Bruce Banner/Betty Ross, POV Bruce Banner, POV Natasha Romanov, Threats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 08:14:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4130778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/94BottlesOfSnapple/pseuds/94BottlesOfSnapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A retelling of the two sides to the Calcutta scene in Avengers.</p>
<p>The fact of the matter was, Natasha Romanoff probably thought she knew what she was getting into.<br/>The other fact of the matter was, she really, really didn't.</p>
<p>The fact of the matter was, Bruce Banner probably thought he knew exactly what everyone wanted from him.<br/>The other fact of the matter was, he really, really didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bruce

Maybe it was carelessness, or gullibility.

Maybe he’d been settled so long he’d subconsciously lowered his guard. It was always easy to tell when Thaddeus Ross was in the neighborhood, one of the many reasons Bruce hardly found himself cornered anymore. The few times he _had_ been, well… Nobody had liked how those days had ended up.

Maybe it was because she was a child. The way she’d said ‘please’ had ached somewhere deep inside him – he’d said ‘please’ like that once, at her age, to the thin air because no one could save him.

Whatever the reason, Bruce Banner – with his three doctorates and innate suspicion – had been utterly duped right up until the moment the little girl slipped out the window of the shack. He’d thought he was being so careful, too – turning his back to the conspicuously military jeep when he stopped the girl from running into its path in her desperate haste to lead Bruce to her father. But then suddenly he was alone, staring at an empty room in a building on the edge of town, and there were very few reasons for that.

Something in him – the part that had had the audacity to wink at Betty seconds before testing a potentially life-threatening device on himself – had to crack a joke. Because if Bruce didn’t laugh, he would probably scream, and no one wanted that.

“Should’ve got paid up front, Banner,” the doctor mused to himself with a self-depreciating smirk as he braced his forearm on the frame and peered out the window, like a fruitless trip or being made a fool were the most of his worries.

“You know,” called a voice from behind him, “for a man who’s supposed to be avoiding stress, you picked a hell of a place to settle.”

Bruce turned his head towards the interloper a bit reluctantly as she spoke, because whatever way they wanted him facing was the opposite way he wanted to face. The first thing he noticed was the odd twist to the woman’s lips – humor covering fear, he’d bet on it. His next thought after that was that at least the assassin they’d sent after him had tried to blend in a little. Though her pale skin and bright maroon-red hair were startling, she’d at least dressed the part instead of coming to meet him in fatigues. And at least she wasn’t another Betty look-alike, because Bruce wasn’t sure either he or the assassin had the emotional fortitude for everyone to survive an encounter that charged with rage.

He knew she was an assassin because she walked too fluidly to be anything else. Soldiers had a weight to them, special-ops like Blonsky fell somewhere in the middle between agile and solid, but spies and assassins were lighter – and anyone who’d sent a spy after Bruce that wasn’t also an assassin was dumb enough that they wouldn’t have gotten far enough to find him in the first place.

Pushing away from the window with his right arm, Bruce turned the rest of his body towards the woman and finally considered her words. Avoiding stress? Just how could anyone expect him to avoid stress? His _life_ was stress. The Other Guy was stress. General Ross was stress, but he hardly counted unless they were face to face and Bruce had decided they never would be again. He wanted to laugh right in her face, this redhead who talked like a psychologist and walked like a weapon.

“Avoiding stress isn’t the secret,” he told her instead, idly.

“Then what is it?” she asked with a smirk, tilting her head in a move he instantly processed as an attempt to endear her to him. “Yoga?”

Yoga, meditation, breathing exercises. Control the body to control emotion. Low-key methods to balance himself, certainly, but not The Secret as she was after it. And it was funny, how transparently she was digging for it. How to stop the monster. How to control the beast. Stop, contain, control.

Suddenly Bruce didn’t feel like humoring her anymore. The not-so-subtle attempts to figure him out had a banter-like cadence, but they were far more dangerous. Manipulating him wasn’t a game, or if it was then it was one Bruce was tired of people trying to play. The point of their situation wasn’t him, wasn’t his condition, it was the fact that he’d been cornered again. The fact that the assassin wanted something.

“You brought me to the edge of the city. Smart,” he complimented, rubbing his hands to release nervous energy – he wasn’t scared, how could he be, but it’d been a while since he’d had a martial confrontation. “I, uh, assume the whole place is surrounded?”

Bruce gestured vaguely at the walls of the shack as he paced to a different corner, then glanced out the window there. He didn’t _see_ any gunmen, but that meant very little, in his experience. The redhead drew closer with a swaying gait, but only slightly – still a yard or so away. That was smart of her too, because Bruce didn’t feel like dealing with her or any military flunkies at the moment and his impatience was a bit more deadly than most people’s.

“Just you and me,” she promised him, tossing out an arm.

Placating. He hated when they did that. Like he was the sort of person who could fall for that. The sort of man who was still foolish or desperate enough to believe someone like her could have his best interests at heart. A gullible, timid little nothing, a thin shell of consciousness to hide an idiot beast. There was a roar in Bruce’s head and the sensation of large green fingers pressing hard against the back of his skull. The physicist turned away to squeeze his eyes shut and force the feeling down.

“And your little actress buddy?” asked Bruce with bile in his throat, gesturing towards where the girl had escaped. “She a spy” – he was careful to say ‘spy’ and not ‘assassin’ – “too? They start that young?”

Or had she just been paid to do it without knowing why? The memory of the crinkled bills squeezed in her little fist ached under Bruce’s sternum. Well. If that was the case, better she’d gotten the money to sell him out than not. No doubt she needed it. Everyone who came to him – instead of an actually certified medical doctor – needed it.

Bruce glanced back at the assassin and found a sudden openness in her eyes. A vulnerability she’d not had when lying to him. They were held a bit wider too, constrained in a way that spoke of feigned earnestness along with the real – but he could hardly hold that against her, considering the threat he presented.

“ _I_ did,” she admitted, and he wondered for a moment why she’d told him that.

“Who are you?” Bruce asked, brows furrowed.

“Natasha Romanoff,” answered the assassin immediately, and the mask of pleasant formality slipped over her beautiful face again.

Bruce wanted to laugh. But the sound would be broken and bitter and angry – and she didn’t need to know just yet how very angry he was. No, not until he paid her back for thinking she could lie to his face. Instead, Bruce offered her a hopefully-charming smile – he hadn’t had much time to practice charming while running for his _goddamn life_ – and ducked his head to hide the flash of green swirling in his irises.

“Are you here to kill me, Miss Romanoff?” Bruce wondered aloud, absently tapping the palm of his right hand against the knuckles of his left and glancing up at her. “Because, that’s not gonna work out for everyone.”

The hidden threat – not _well_ -hidden, obviously, but the kind of people who chased him tended to be a bit thick-skulled in any case – seemed to startle Romanoff a bit.

“No, no of course not, I’m here on behalf of SHIELD,” she told him immediately, taking a few more sauntering steps forward so that they stood only a foot and a half apart.

Daring. But given her employers, that was hardly a shock to him.

“SHIELD,” mused Bruce with a nod, pursing his lips just slightly. “How’d they find me?”

And if his own fishing for information was as blatant as hers had been, well, there was no one around to judge him for it except the very people trying to catch him, so what the hell. She was trying for the open and innocent act with him, she might let something slip. Always good to re-evaluate, to close up loopholes, fill in weaknesses.

“We never lost you, doctor,” Romanoff told him gently, like breaking bad news to a child. “We’ve kept our distance. Even kept some other interested parties off your scent.”

A pulse of panic slammed into his chest, but Bruce managed to keep his breathing relatively steady. And though there was another roar in his brain, since Harlem he’d gotten enough control of himself – of the Other Guy – that they meant very little aside from a slight headache. He couldn’t bear to look at her though, not when his year of solitude, of _freedom_ , had been no more than a spectacularly executed fantasy.

“Why?” Bruce choked out, and hated how hunted his voice sounded.

“Nick Fury seems to trust you,” said Romanoff with another knowing smile. “But, now we need you to come in.”

Need you to come in, like he was some agent who’d been on leave. Like he worked for them. Bruce turned to face her fully, expression grim. The games were done, because at last they had come to the crux of the conflict – the same one as always. There were people who thought that Bruce, or rather who thought that _the Hulk_ belonged to them. And he didn’t.

“What if I said no?”

“I’ll persuade you,” she replied, mouth curling oddly around ‘persuade’ like it was sour on her tongue.

It was a joke. They both knew what she really meant. But Bruce wasn’t the one Romanoff would have to ‘persuade’ if things got heated, and he wondered if maybe she’d forgotten that. Likely she hadn’t, but then again he’d let himself be led to the edge of the city without even thinking – it was a day for forgetfulness and stupid mistakes.

“What if the… Other Guy, says no?” Bruce inquired patiently, locking eyes with the redhead across from him.

“You’ve been more than a year without an incident,” Romanoff reminded him, though she backed away and started towards the other end of the house. “I don’t think you want to break that streak.”

_Watched_ , she was reminding him. _We’ve had eyes on you this whole time._

Bruce, however, allowed himself to linger instead of following her, and the cradle next to him caught his eye. He offered it a sad smile and thought about the things he’d _wanted_ in his life.

Betty’s face, lips parted as she spoke his name, flashed before his waking eyes. His mother’s smile. An anonymous baby cradled in anonymous arms. The burning strain on Bruce’s senses as he waited with bated breath for green to recede from his cells and not return. Half a second of blackness after the report of a gun.

“Well,” he said aloud as he rocked the bassinet gently with one hand, the understatement of his words almost humorous to a point beyond pain, “I don’t every time get what I want.”

Bruce noted when the assassin spoke again that she did it more matter-of-factly, and he made sure to pay attention. Finally, she was cutting to the chase. Just what they wanted the monster for, what sort of devastation they thought his toxic blood could possibly avert.

“Doctor, we’re facing a potential global catastrophe,” she said sharply, fiddling with a phone.

Of course they were. He glanced up at the ceiling and couldn’t help, at last, letting out a soft little burst of angry laughter.

“Well, those I… actively try to avoid,” Bruce assured.

She ignored the jab.

“This,” Romanoff said, nodding and holding up her phone so the screen faced him, “is the Tesseract.”

The image was of a translucent blue cube. She set down the phone on a table next to her, sliding it across the surface gently.

“It has the potential energy to wipe out the planet.”

At last Bruce’s curiosity got the better of him and he strode over to the table, unfolding his reading glasses from his breast pocket and slipping them onto his nose. Though he kept his gaze on the phone as he reached out to pick it up, in his peripheral Bruce noticed that the assassin had seated herself at the table across from him. She wanted a conversation. Or it was another vulnerability ploy. Either way, he did not sit.

Instead, Bruce stared down at the image of the glowing blue cube for a few seconds before his eyes darted back up to Romanoff. Though the image was of a decent resolution, it still gave him no idea exactly what the thing was, or why it could be so very destructive. The thought made the corner of his lips twitch, just a bit. That description, at least, was familiar. The Tesseract: another inconspicuous nuke, like him.

“What does Fury want _me_ to do?” he snorted. “Swallow it?”

Romanoff leaned in, and Bruce found himself looking down at the cube again because her insistence on acting intimate and friendly was really beginning to rankle.

“He wants you to find it,” she explained. “It’s been taken. It emits a gamma signature” – his gaze flicked back up again, but Bruce managed to keep the surprise from his features – “that’s too weak for us to trace. No one knows gamma radiation like you do.”

_No kidding_ , Bruce thought to himself wryly. But the fact that she was bringing up his scientific work had him torn between pleasure and panic. It had been so long – so _very_ long – since he’d been able to use his mind and expertise the way he wanted to. But was she telling the truth? Maybe. That or it was just another hook: appeal to the man, to his interests, to capture the monster.

“If there was,” Romanoff finished, leaning back in the chair, “that’s where I’d be.”

He sincerely doubted that, but as he set down the phone he decided not to call her on it.

“So Fury isn’t after the monster,” Bruce concluded aloud instead, tugging off his glasses to see her more clearly, and shoving them back in his pocket.

“Not that he’s told me.”

A cop-out. _Classy_. But at least it wasn’t a lie.

“And he tells you everything?” Bruce pushed skeptically.

There was a long pause. Probably too long and they both realized it.

“Talk to Fury,” the redheaded assassin settled on hurriedly. “He needs you on this.”

What Fury needed, Bruce didn’t particularly care. And he was tired of letting Romanoff think she had the upper hand.

“He needs me in a cage?” Bruce countered.

Romanoff leaned forward, arms across the table like she might grab his hands in hers. Her expression was gentle, but in the same shuttered way the rest of her expressions had been. Placating. Trying to keep him calm. Just one more white lie to keep the mindless beast at bay.

Another snarl in Bruce’s brain.

“No one’s gonna put you in a—”

“STOP LYING TO ME!”

Bruce leaned forward and slammed his hands on the table and almost immediately found a gun pointed at his heart. The assassin’s draw as she threw herself back from him had been smooth, and the gun’s barrel didn’t waver from his chest, but he could see the pulse racing in her neck. That, at last, drew a genuine smile from the physicist, even if it was a bit of a rude one.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce apologized, insincere but gentle, and stood up straight, “that was mean.”

The smile spread wider across his face, and Romanoff took a shuddering breath. Fierce joy, feral joy, filled his chest for a second – the rush of release. A pleased rumble of what might have been laughter echoed in his head, emanating from where his skull met his spine.

“I just wanted to see what you’d do,” Bruce explained to the assassin, raising his hands to chest-height, palms facing her.

_I’m unarmed_ , the gesture said. She knew better than to believe that, if she was smart. Bruce Banner was always armed. It was a gesture as flimsy and meaningless as her deceptions, in the end.

But it was better for people to know what they were dealing with, wasn’t it? Better to know that the Hulk was a bomb that would go off in their faces before Bruce would let them aim him at anyone else.

“Why don’t we do this the easy way,” he suggested slowly, “where you don’t use that” – a quick point towards the gun – “and the… Other Guy” – a tap of fingertips on his own chest – “doesn’t make a… mess.”

The barrel of Romanoff’s gun shook after that, her fingers trembling slightly. And even though it was wrong, part of him was pleased she was so afraid. She thought she could bring him into the fold quietly. Thought he’d let her get away with lying to him, or perhaps thought he was too naïve to realize that she _was_ lying. Then again, maybe it was more surety in her own skill than underestimation of his. Perhaps she’d successfully manipulated more dangerous men.

Only, there wasn’t a more dangerous man in the world than Bruce Banner, even if people didn’t always believe that. He paused for a second, two, and fixed her with the same intense, earnest gaze she had given him in the beginning. Turning the act back on its originator.

“Alright?” he finished softly. “Natasha?”

The intimacy of her first name seemed to startle her for a moment. Then, slowly, Romanoff lowered the gun and raised her right hand to her ear, turning to the side.

“Stand down,” she murmured. “We’re good here.”

Bruce’s lips pressed into an amused smile, brows pushed up towards his hairline in an expression he knew would read like embarrassment for her predicament. _Caught you_ , he thought.

“Just you and me,” he said.

Romanoff’s lovely face finally took on the chagrined expression Bruce had been waiting for, and her arms dropped to her sides. Now, they could begin their talk. Because she’d been right before, he had no real interest in another of his… incidents. But that didn’t mean he’d do anything possible to avoid one, either. Sometimes, he’d learned, the Other Guy could be useful. Certainly more useful at stopping a bullet than Bruce was. And he’d rather the Hulk be let loose on SHIELD’s agents than that they both be locked away. He had enough trouble keeping his blood away from people without an agency that had ties to the American government – and therefore its military – taking him in.

Bruce Banner had had enough of being forced into corners.

If he decided to ‘come in’, as Romanoff had suggested, it would be on his own terms.

“I think maybe you should start your persuasion over,” he said, adjusting his jacket sleeve. “Just a thought.”

Romanoff squeezed her eyes shut for a second and let out a sigh. After that, her shoulders noticeably dropped their panicked tension. When she refocused on him, it was with a new seriousness. None of the empathetic, calming attempt she’d gone for previously. Instead, she crossed her arms over her chest – a defensive position, Bruce quantified without expression – and stared at him down. He was a stray dog she hadn’t expected to bite. But she was an assassin, a spy, and she adjusted quickly.

Bruce liked that. More because it boded well in terms of how likely a gunfight would be – namely, less likely if Agent Romanoff kept her cool as she appeared to be doing – than from any personal preference about her demeanor. Although the absence of her former false sympathy certainly wasn’t a loss.

She was realizing the only way to get his cooperation was to do things on his terms. And that meant telling the truth, because continuing to try and deceive him would get someone hurt and it wouldn’t be Bruce.

“The cube is an energy source,” the redhead started with a near-robotic monotone, only broken by the biting way she generally inflected her words. “Potentially the key to unlimited energy. It’s also a portal into the other end of space. And we can’t track it without _you_ , doctor. I wasn’t lying about that.”

Bruce nodded, putting a hand to his chin as he pretended to think.

“Alright,” he said. “I believe you.”

“We’re also calling in fighters to get the Tesseract back once it’s found. Captain America, and Iron Man. All we need from you is a way to find its location.”

Folding his arms behind his back, Bruce paced the room slowly. Reaching the window he’d glanced out before, he craned his neck to lock eyes with Natasha, who was still standing next to the table.

“Captain America, huh?” he asked.

“The one and only,” Romanoff informed him. “Our people found him up in the Arctic, frozen in ice. Just like the day he crashed, in ‘45.”

An involuntary sardonic smirk overtook Bruce’s face.

“Gotta hand it to Dr. Erskine, I suppose,” he mused. “His work is certainly impressive.”

There was a long silence after that, and Bruce spent it contemplating the strange juxtaposition he would make with Captain America. Failure pushed up next to success. A frazzled, aging physicist with a pulsing rage inside him and a handsome super soldier in his prime. He’d seen the pictures of Captain Rogers, like everyone had. Watched the old newsreels.

But for all their differences, had either of them really known what they were getting into, in the end?

“So is yours.”

The statement jolted Bruce from his thought process and into a laugh.

“You haven’t seen _my_ work yet,” he told her. “I don’t think impressive is the word you’d use then.”

She pointedly ignored the self-depreciation. _Too soon for Hulk jokes._ Well, he _had_ just threatened to let the Other Guy mangle her if she kept screwing with him.

“The world, _our world_ , is on the line here, Dr. Banner,” Romanoff said sharply.

“The world is _always_ on the line, Agent Romanoff,” Bruce replied, turning back to fully face her with a derisive look on his face. “Haven’t you learned that by now?”

Always someone wanting something. For the greater good. For our country. For our troops. For the children. _Your work is going to save the world, Dr. Banner_. He’d fallen for that bait before, hook line and sinker, right before he and Betty and General Ross had made something huge and green and terrible together.

Moral platitudes wouldn’t get her anywhere with him.

But when Romanoff stared him down her eyes were narrowed in something like anger, and Bruce wondered if maybe her concern was less for the world and more for people. The physicist sighed and looked down at his hands, flexing them slowly. He didn’t trust SHIELD. No, how could he? But even though it hadn’t passed her lips there was a ‘please’ in Romanoff’s face that reminded him of the little girl and of himself. It was hiding behind false sympathy and an assassin’s blankness and righteous anger, but it was there.

Maybe he was being duped again. But Bruce Banner was never alone, or without protection, so did it really matter? They couldn’t kill him even if they wanted to.

And if someone or something really was going to destroy the world, well that meant Betty too. It meant Stanley. And Leonard Sampson. It meant Martina, from the bottling plant in Brazil. It meant Eric Selvig. The Culver University staff. It meant everyone he’d tried to help in India. It meant the redheaded assassin standing across from him. Hell, it meant Ross and his goddamned Hulkbusters.

And as tired as he was of being cornered, Bruce was even more tired of letting people die.

“Alright,” he told Romanoff with a shrug, playing the decision off, as he approached her. “I’ll go. It’s not every day you get a chance to meet Captain America, right?”

To make up for before, he offered a less accusatory smile and dipped his head in a clear apology. Her mouth twitched like she wanted to smile in return but was too weary to do it.

“Well, you’re not wrong,” Romanoff agreed at last, turning for the door and watching him over her shoulder. “Just follow me, doc. Hope you don’t get airsick.”

_If I did_ , he thought, _that’d be the least of our problems._

But he followed anyway.

_Your work is going to save the world, Bruce Banner._

Maybe it’d be true this time.


	2. Natasha

Natasha Romanoff feared nothing.

It was a lie, of course, but one she might as well tell herself if she wanted others to believe it too.

She had a mission to complete, and very little leeway in completing it. Approaching directly was unacceptable – too many people around, too many witnesses. Too many potential victims. And while death was nothing new to her, that didn’t mean she particularly liked it or that putting her target in a situation where he might harm civilians would endear her to him in any way.

And it was an easy-to-fix situation. A little underhanded, perhaps, but Dr. Banner would thank her for it in the long run. The girl she’d selected really did need the money, and eagerly carried out Natasha’s instructions. All the spy had to do was wait, and she was very good at that.

“Should’ve got paid up front, Banner,” she heard her target murmur to himself.

It was the self-depreciation that helped her put the finishing touches on her mask, to let all the thoughts and anxiety go to focus on the mission at hand. Calm. Everyone had to be calm.

“You know, for a man who’s supposed to be avoiding stress,” Natasha said with a teasing smile, “you picked a hell of a place to settle.”

The doctor didn’t seem startled, and she wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign or a bad one. So she waited quietly, didn’t push. Slow and steady won the race, after all. Impatience would get her nowhere.

“Avoiding stress isn’t the secret,” Banner insisted.

“Then what is it?” Natasha wondered aloud, cocking her head about thirty degrees to the right in a way that eased most men. “Yoga?”

However, the move only made Banner turn away from her and change the subject.

“You brought me to the edge of the city,” he pointed out with the sort of nonchalance that told her he’d been lured to places like the shack they were in quite often. “Smart. I, uh, assume the whole place is surrounded?”

He glanced out the window, as if to check, but Natasha wasn’t worried. The agents sent on her mission – her invisible backup – knew better than to be standing anywhere that could be seen from within the building. She took four steps forward, and the sway in her hips was only half-purposeful; a defense. Though she’d not been sent to seduce him, she’d found a lot of men more pliable when her movements were smooth and her voice was low and she smiled.

“Just you and me.”

It was the first lie, and the most important. Dr. Banner was a man who’d been hunted, and it was what he needed to hear. What he needed to _believe_ , so she said it carefully – with a casual tone, not a promise because he’d been on the end of too many broken promises, the way she had.

She said it because her priority was to make him feel safe, unthreatened; so she could feel safe and unthreatened. A man was nothing, men she had handled before, but his monster was something impossible to control. And, well, if things went according to plan Dr. Banner would never even have to know about the squad of well-armed SHIELD agents surrounding the shack.

“And your little,” the doctor deflected, gesturing vaguely towards the window, “actress buddy? She a spy too? They start that young?”

She was losing him. He kept changing the subject, looking at her like he wanted her to leave. She had to dredge up something genuine, to get his attention again. The Red Room surged in Natasha’s chest and she breathed it out silently.

“ _I_ did,” she managed at last, pulling a sardonic smile into place to hide her grimace, but keeping her eyes as bared as she could for him.

Banner considered that for a moment.

“Who are you?”

Good. He’d taken the bait. Natasha released her tenuous hold on her memories and let them slip back beneath her shell.

“Natasha Romanoff,” she answered, knowing that wasn’t quite what he meant.

Dr. Banner’s lips quirked upward, and he ducked his head. It looked like a show of shyness, or modesty, but the aura of it made Natasha narrow her eyes. She had the distinct feeling he was attempting to play her, but she wasn’t sure to what end.

“Are you here to kill me, Miss Romanoff? Because, that’s not gonna work out,” Dr. Banner admitted, tapping one hand against the other, “for everyone.”

But it had been foolish to overlook that, maybe. People had been sent to kill him before. She’d hoped her presentation – feminine, soft, a little teasing – would have dissuaded him from thinking of her as an assassin, but apparently not.

“No, no, of course not,” Natasha insisted hurriedly. “I’m here on behalf of SHIELD.”

To cement her point, she took several steps forward. _We’re all friends here. I’m not afraid, and you shouldn’t be either_. Banner nodded a bit as he took the information in, and his mouth tightened.

“SHIELD,” repeated the doctor. “How’d they find me?”

His tone seemed like an attempt at nonchalance, but Natasha caught his Adam’s apple bob slightly as he swallowed between sentences. While her attention was on his throat, she also saw the slight tick of his pulse, slightly too fast to be normal. As a man who valued his privacy, who had spent more than half a decade running from everything and everyone he’d once cared about, it was important she break the news gently.

Because this, at least, she could not lie to him about.

Natasha softened her voice, kept her eyes wide and sympathetic, and didn’t shift her gaze away from his.

“We never lost you doctor. We’ve kept our distance,” she admitted. “Even kept some other interested parties off your scent.”

Ross, of course, being the obvious one, but there were others. And Dr. Banner would hopefully take that peace as acceptable tradeoff for the fact that SHIELD had been keeping an eye on him. He hadn’t been bothered, he’d had a year of peace.

However, Banner looked away from her and though his expression would read as blank to an amateur, Natasha could see the betrayal he was feeling as clear as if he’d shouted the accusation at her. And she hadn’t even gotten to her reason for meeting him. The spy wished for a fleeting moment that she’d been assigned to gather someone else. Rogers would have been good; Stark knew her too well to go along with anything she suggested, and she was fine with leaving him to Coulson. Then again, Captain Rogers came with his own problems. And Coulson trusted her to get the job done, not complain.

“Why?” demanded Banner, gaze still trained willfully at the wall.

The half of his face she could see radiated skepticism, fear. The thought of a hand extended to him, free of charge, was impossible for the doctor to accept. Natasha had been that way once, too. And it wasn’t that he was necessarily wrong, because she hadn’t just come to shoot the breeze. SHIELD needed him, ASAP.

“Nick Fury seems to trust you,” she offered, and wondered if Banner even knew how much that meant, to be, even marginally, trusted by a man who trusted no one. “But, now we need you to come in.”

The reveal of her mission had Banner squaring his shoulders and facing her completely again. He managed to paint an almost intimidating picture that way, beyond what she knew about the actual danger he posed.

“What if I said no?” he asked sharply, all but daring Natasha to make a move – to step on the trigger plate of his temper.

Daring her to fight him, to piss him off. Two items on her list of things to absolutely _not_ do during the mission. Feeling her lips twist wryly as she tried to navigate the slim corridor between firmness and cornering him, Natasha spoke.

“I’ll persuade you.”

‘Persuade’ felt like the wrong word, for all that it was the right one. So often, she had used ‘persuade’ as a code for seduction, or for deadly force. Neither was on the agenda with Banner, volatile as his fits of temper could be – she’d been left instead with her wits and rationale; she would genuinely have to get him to see reason.

His eyes just narrowed, and she wondered for a second if he’d seen the diverse and dangerous ways she’d _persuaded_ men before in her gaze.

“And if the,” Dr. Banner paused with understandable discomfort, though his words were an innate threat, “Other Guy says no?”

Natasha was very careful to ignore that threat, to not give him the upper hand. It was an obvious tactic, to play on fear in order to win the day without having to spill a drop of blood. But Natasha had seen, beyond that Bruce Banner was the kind of man who didn’t take joy in killing or hurting others, the way he feared losing control.

“You’ve been more than a year without an incident. I don’t think you want to break that streak,” she offered, backing towards the shack’s table.

They needed to talk, to get their pointed and accusatory conversation to the place where it could be a discussion about what SHIELD needed Banner to do. The best way to do that was to draw on societal convention, get the doctor to subconsciously see their situation as a business proposal instead of an order or a trap.

He didn’t follow her across the room, however, resting a hand on the bassinet in the middle of the shack instead.

“Well, I don’t every time get what I want,” Banner answered ruefully, rocking the edge of the rough-hewn cradle.

Ice spiked through Natasha’s chest at the gesture. His meaning was obvious, and hit a little too close to home. Regardless of wanting it or not, the choice to have a family, to have children, had been taken from them both. Taking a deep breath through her nose, Natasha imagined familiar, warm fingers pressing sharply into the base of her skull, carding through her hair. The way Clint had held her up after that confession, taking no note of the vomit all over his newly-cleaned wood floors.

_You survived that, Nat. You’re going to keep going, because you have to, and because I’m here to help you. God knows you don’t have to do this alone. You are not a tool. You’re a fighter. You’re Natasha Romanoff and nothing can ever break you._

The mantra eased the bile back down her throat before Banner had drawn himself from self-pity, and Natasha found herself angry at them both. There was a mission to be completed, Loki needed to be stopped and Clint needed to be found – there was no time for _anyone_ to be feeling sorry for themselves.

“Doctor,” the spy said, tone severe, “we’re facing a potential global catastrophe.”

But instead of snapping from his melancholy, Banner drew his gaze up to the shacks ceiling and laughed – a quick little ‘haha’ that held very little amusement and a lot of spite.

“Well,” he retorted, “those I… actively try to avoid.”

Natasha drew up a picture of the Tesseract on her phone and held it out to show Banner. If nothing else, perhaps the science would get him to finally pay attention – it worked well enough with Stark. Tilting her head towards the device in her hands, Natasha began her spiel.

“This is the Tesseract,” she explained, then set the phone down and slid it to the opposite side of the table, an invitation for him to come closer and examine the cube for himself. “It has the potential energy to wipe out the planet.”

That, finally, got Banner to approach her, and Natasha settled into a chair. The doctor pulled out a pair of wire-frame glasses and perched them on his face before picking up the phone. She noticed that he held it only slightly above the table, around waist height. Whether that was to keep her in his peripheral or in case the phone itself was a weapon, she wasn’t sure. But he was studying the cube and that was all that mattered – she’d caught his interest.

“What does Fury want _me_ to do? Swallow it?” he asked at last, derisively.

She was beginning to realize that Banner’s hang-ups about the Hulk were likely going to be more of a problem than the beast itself. It was what his mind went to, immediately, in every situation. To be fair, the Hulk had changed his entire life and was a chronic part of it even if he had learned to better control his incidents. And maybe it could be an in, too. No one wanted the Hulk loose on the Helicarrier, Fury probably least of all – they wanted, and needed, the scientist Bruce Banner. If she could convince Dr. Banner of that, it might help.

She leaned forward, a shortcut to intimacy in the conversation, as she corrected him.

“He wants you to find it. It’s been taken. It emits a gamma signature too weak for us to trace,” Natasha clarified, noticing the way Banner’s concentration broke from the picture of the cube when she mentioned gamma. “No one knows gamma radiation like you do. If there was,” – she leaned back from the table, positioning her shoulders to read casual, confident – “that’s where I’d be.”

It was several seconds before Banner responded to that, setting Natasha’s phone back on the table.

“So Fury isn’t after the monster.”

 _Precisely_. But the spy didn’t allow a victorious smile to cross her lips just yet.

“Not that he’s told me,” she allowed.

“And he tells you everything?” demanded Banner, the edge of paranoia back in his voice.

The answer was obviously no, but that would only stoke his suspicions that he was being trapped. And saying yes would be a fool move, a lie that could untangle all the progress she’d made with him. In other words, there was no good solution. And she’d waited a second too long to respond.

“Talk to Fury. He needs you on this,” Natasha insisted at last, knowing all the while it was a cop-out, a throwaway – passing the buck on to the director.

“He needs me in a cage?” Banner spat.

She was losing him again. He was getting angry. Though her pulse was beginning to race, Natasha leaned forward instead of back, reaching across the table. If she could get his hand, she could get a read on his pulse – make some sort of soothing motion to calm him. Something.

“No one’s gonna put you in a—”

“STOP LYING TO ME!” Banner roared, slamming his fists onto the wood of the table.

Natasha threw herself bodily back from the table, knocking the chair over in the process. In the same motion, she snatched up the gun in her thigh holster, flipped off the safety, and cocked it. The way she was crouched, it was aimed squarely at Banner’s heart. Her pulse raced in her ears like a frantic drumbeat and Natasha could have sworn she was already dead.

News footage of a snarling, eight-foot monster reeled past her vision. A special-ops soldier kicked face-first into a tree with a sickening _thwack_. A police car ripped in two like butter, a tank swung like a projectile. And she was facing down _that monster_ with a _handgun_.

It was three seconds before Natasha realized that not only was she still aiming a gun at a man and not a monster, but that he looked in no danger of changing that. In fact, a slow, knowing smile had spread across Banner’s very human face.

“I’m sorry, that was mean,” he apologized, pulling an almost mocking expression that reminded her of a guilty child. “I just wanted to see what you’d do.”

Natasha took in a shuddering breath, trying to rein in her heartbeat. It didn’t help. Banner put up his empty hands slowly, with the palms facing her. He looked anything but contrite or defenseless, and Natasha Romanoff realized suddenly that the man before her terrified her.

Not for his destructive potential, but for the way he looked at her like she was nothing more than a child. Like he was waiting for her to catch up. Like she was a fool for trying to deceive him and that someone might get hurt if she tried it again.

“Why don’t we do this the easy way, where you don’t use that,” he offered in an unassuming, gentle voice, pointing at her gun, “and the… Other Guy… doesn’t make a… mess.”

A mess. That was all she would be if she tried to shoot him. A mess of blood and brains on the floor. Natasha thought she’d imagined every possible death for herself, but the way Banner threatened her – like he was _shy_ about it – made her hands spasm in fear, and the gun shook.

“Alright? Natasha?” the doctor finished, his face a perfect show of open compassion.

The way he said her name like they were friends – or rather like she was a frightened little girl – unbalanced her for a second. Just one.

The only possible answer to his offer was yes. And she hadn’t wanted to get into a confrontation with Banner in the first place, though she’d known it was a possibility. That was why she hadn’t actually been sent alone. And as she lowered her gun, Natasha realized that for all that she’d thought she had him on the ropes, it was the doctor who had played _her_. Forced her to show her own hand. She pressed her fingertips to the com in her ear and spoke slowly like she wasn’t ashamed.

“Stand down,” she ordered the others. “We’re good here.”

When Natasha looked back up at Banner, straightening from her crouch, he was staring at her as if he pitied her.

“Just you and me,” he parroted from her earlier words, and she almost cringed.

The manipulations had been about as useless as her gun. Banner was much more perceptive than she’d thought to plan for, too focused on contingency plans if the Hulk made an appearance. But it had been foolish of her to underestimate a hunted man. Trying to keep him calm by telling him what he wanted to hear had backfired, he’d made that extremely clear.

“I think maybe you should start your persuasion over,” suggested Banner. “Just a thought.”

If pretty lies and stretched truths had set him off, the solution was obvious. Closing her eyes tightly to recalibrate, Natasha took in a deep breath and released it, along with all the fear of him she could manage to get hold of.

The facts. That was what would get Banner on their side, and she couldn’t afford to fail.

It pissed her off that she felt safer with a useless gesture like crossing her arms over her chest, but it was necessary because she needed to keep control of herself to keep control of the situation.

“The cube is an energy source. Potentially the key to unlimited energy,” Natasha began, mentally dredging through the information that it would be most important to tell him, what could most effectively gain his trust. “It’s also a portal to the other end of space. And we can’t track it without _you_ , doctor. I wasn’t lying about that.”

Banner put on a show like he was considering her words, and it was clear that he was mocking her but after having underestimated him so completely she supposed a little rudeness on his part was the least of anyone’s worries.

“Alright. I believe you,” the doctor concluded, and he wasn’t lying or mocking her then.

Which meant he believed her that SHIELD wanted his scientific expertise. That, though, wouldn’t guarantee they didn’t want the Hulk for anything, so her next priority was to convince him of that.

“We’re also calling in fighters to get the Tesseract back once it’s found,” offered Natasha, to that end. “Captain America, and Iron Man. All we need from you is a way to find its location.”

Banner walked away from her with casual steps, arms behind his back. Once he was across the shack from her, he glanced back over his shoulder to meet her gaze.

“Captain America, huh?”

His interest was clear – and understandable. Though she hadn’t bothered with the scientific intricacies of what Banner had done to himself, what he’d been working on was an attempt to recreate the super soldier serum Rogers had been dosed with. To see the real thing in person would no doubt interest him, intellectually.

“The one and only. Our people found him up in the Arctic, frozen in ice,” she explained. “Just like the day he crashed, in ’45.”

A wry tilt of Banner’s lips had not been the expected response to that news.

“Gotta hand it to Dr. Erskine, I suppose. His work is impressive.”

And then a pensive, self-loathing look came into Banner’s eyes, just before his head turned back to the window. Another misstep. Natasha hadn’t considered the effect his failure to reproduce that serum might have on his views of Rogers. All the same, Banner was a brilliant scientist in his own right – didn’t they need him specifically to help find the Tesseract? There was no reason for him to compare.

“So is yours,” she said, both because it was true and because she’d surely need him back in a healthy mindset before he’d agree to come back to SHIELD with her.

He laughed, sharply, like the sound was painful coming up his throat.

“You haven’t seen _my_ work yet. I don’t think impressive is the word you’d use then,” Banner muttered.

That he was referring to the Hulk, again, instead of his own scientific expertise, _again_ , was apparent. And Natasha was finding herself annoyed. There wasn’t time for him to be playing games with her, to be mocking her with what he thought SHIELD – what everyone – really wanted with him. His paranoia was well-earned, but it was getting in her way and it needed to _stop_.

“The world,” she spat, “ _our world_ , is on the line here, Dr. Banner.”

At that, he turned the rest of his body so that he was looking at her straight on with sour scorn on his face – upper lip lifted slightly in a grimace and a well of regret pooling in his eyes.

“The world is always on the line, Agent Romanoff. Haven’t you learned that by now?”

And maybe he was right. But that was why she worked for SHIELD in the first place. To wipe out the red in her ledger, to fix what she’d broken and save the world that saw fit to send Clint Barton to save her. And Coulson’s words – the ones that had nearly stopped her heart – were ringing in her ears and stirring her pulse as she stared Banner down.

 _Barton’s been compromised_.

They needed to find the cube to find Clint, and they needed Banner to find the cube, and it was Natasha’s mission to get him. She would not back down. Not when the man she owed her life was spinning out of her grasp with every second she waited for Dr. Banner to get his act together and come in. Nothing, not even the Hulk, would stop her. She couldn’t control him, could hardly control the situation with Banner, but it didn’t matter.

The world, SHIELD, Fury, Clint – they all needed her to come through, and the Black Widow did not fail.

Her tension reached a boiling point as she watched Banner, staring down at his hands as if they were not his own. But then he looked up at her – through her – and though the self-pity, devastation, had not left his eyes, Natasha found determination to match her own. The dangerous edge he had turned against her could be, would be, used for something else – she knew it before he opened his mouth.

Like everything else about him, that life-altering, world-altering decision was understated.

“Alright. I’ll go,” he said, like it was a joke, though his expression was still deadly serious. “It’s not every day you get a chance to meet Captain America, right?”

Then he smiled at the incongruous jest, and Natasha thought maybe she’d just gotten a glimpse of the scientist Betty Ross had fallen in love with – someone good in his core, with a heart worth saving. Banner inclined his head, an acknowledgement and an apology, and she wanted to return the smile because camaraderie was important and she was sincerely glad things were finally moving again instead of languishing in a panicked limbo. But the vestiges of her fear-induced adrenaline rush were trembling beneath the pads of her fingers and Clint was missing.

Still, she could play along.

“Well, you’re not wrong. Just follow me, doc,” Natasha quipped as she walked out the shack’s door, tossing a glance back at Dr. Banner. “Hope you don’t get airsick.”

The sarcastic look that came over his face then seemed less a cover for devastation and more amused.

It would take them several hours to fly in to the Helicarrier. And though she’d been a bit nervous about the flight back before, she wasn’t any longer.

Banner had found a reason good enough for him – whatever it was, she didn’t care – a reason good enough to trust her, trust SHIELD, at least the slightest bit. And though he was dangerous, he was also the kind of man that didn’t go back on anything – once he chose a course of action, whether it was testing his experiment on himself or leaving the woman he loved behind in order to keep the military from getting their hands on his blood, he stuck to it. For this single conflict, he was willing to work with them.

She’d succeeded in getting the most dangerous man in the world on their side.

And come hell or high water, Natasha Romanoff was going to make sure Loki regretted ever stepping foot on her planet.


End file.
